“All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.” Such was Mark Twain’s verdict on the Paige Compositor, a typesetting device which was among the most complex machines ever built up to that point in history. It was also a ruinous disaster for everyone involved — despite being a good idea . Twain came to see Paige’s machine as an “immense historical birth”: the point of origin for new mechanical lifeforms that would someday mimic the human mind. In a 1889 letter to his invention-mad brother Orion, Twain called the Paige machine “a cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived” and claimed it would make “telephones, locomotives,” even “Babbage calculators” seem like “mere toys, simplicities!” Twain visiting Paige and his machine, as depicted in the 1944 film The Adventures of Mark Twain (colorized).…